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Ask yourself if you've heard music from a female composer lately
Go to a wine festival to learn about wine and get a scoop of the scene
Take a leap of faith and pursue your passion
Mother’s Day Concerts at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts with Kronos Quartet
It almost seems strange, finding a Kronos Quartet concert billed as “Women’s Voices.” In a genre dominated by dead white guys, this group is naturally inclined to work with women.
Not only has string group Kronos Quartet assembled a significant list of long-term female collaborators and composers over their tenure, they come from around the world. Franghiz Ali-Zadeh is a pianist and composer from Azerbaijan, Alexandra du Bois got her start learning violin in Virginia, Tanya Tagaq is an Inuit throat singer from Cambridge Bay, Canada, and that’s without mentioning Asha Bhosle, Sophia Gubaidalina or the others.
Over Mother’s Day weekend Kronos continues its multi-year collaboration with Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA), one of the most unique and exciting art museums in the country. The contemporary concert features more than one world premier, thematically collected as a concert that celebrates the female perspective.
Serena’s preview picks for Dry Creek Passport Weekend
Come mid-Spring, wine festivals sprout like bolting chard. Although there are dozens I’ve never attended, and dozens more of which I’ve never heard, the flurry I have been to over the years has left me with a steady pattern: this season means wine tasting for me.
I tend to rack up points on my odometer and learn a lot about wine.
Even with the abundance of wine-growing regions celebrating new releases, Dry Creek Passport Weekend has been marked on my calendar years running. Some combination of the stunning setting, the variety and quality of wines, and the fanfare at each winery make it a consistent hit. It’s sold out again this year.
If you didn’t snag ticket you can head to most of the wineries today and enjoy the same reduced rates offered for Passport Weekend. (a full list included at the bottom of this pdf) Also, the area is worth visiting at many times of year, say, on a quiet weekend in the fall when you get the Adirondack chairs on Dry Creek at Truett Hurst all to yourself and the old zin vines are lit up with electic mustard flowers.
So this is by no means your only chance, but if you are one of the lucky ones, here are my preview picks for the festival, the things that I’ve enjoyed and recommended in the region before, and places that are new or caught my eye.
The Travel Writer’s Handbook
Posted in Good Ideas
When I first arrived on the scene – the travel writing scene in the Bay Area – I was told more than once that next to being a celebrity actor, you couldn’t find a more sought-after career choice. That was my tune until I discovered the monthly meetings of Wild Writing Women, a group of amazing female travel writers and story tellers who used to meet near Union Square to talk shop. These ladies sung a different note. Their encouragement really helped me get my first book off the ground.
Over the years I have watched their projects flourish with excitement, and even been a part of some of them, like contributing a story to the anthology they put together about Ireland. Last year, when one of the Wild Writing Women, Jacqueline Harmon Butler, asked me to add my two cents on trip preparedness for her most recent edition of The Travel Writer’s Handbook I jumped at the task. And now I am happy to say I’ve got a copy in my hands!
Earth Day Project: How to Make Soap
Posted in DIY / Good Ideas / Kitchen Adventures / Places / San Francisco Bay Area
As Earth Day weekend quickly approaches I find myself preparing to teach another class of how to make soap. This Sunday I’m teaching the more popular cold process method for the Institute of Urban Homesteading here in Oakland – there still room for one or two more and you can sign up here. If you can’t make it this weekend I’m teaching another cold process class and a hot process class this fall.
*NOTE: Use caution, we are dealing with a seriously caustic hydroxide. Although it’s totally possible to teach yourself, if you are at all apprehensive I do recommend learning soap-making in a class setting where all of the steps are demonstrated and specific issues can be addressed, and I’m not just plugging my class here.*
Making soap is one of those connective activities that, while I’m doing it, makes me feel as though I am really a part of the generations before me. Even though its been years since my first batch, I still recall the myths of soaps discovery along the Tigress River ages ago. It was told to me that the intense ash from nearby active volcanos mixed with mountain stream water and the fat from ritual sacrifices so that when the women would go to wash in the river they’d find suds where the streams met with it. Ash is one of the most basic ways to make a strong base liquid, which then saponifies when it meets with fat. If you couldn’t source lye or potassium hydroxide from the hardware store you could make your own by dunking a pillowcase full of charcoal into a bucket of purified water for several hours, then testing the pH. But even when using store-bought ingredients. the chemical reaction is the same reaction those washer women experienced, and all those who have made soap since.
There are as many variations in making soap as there are in making cheese, and the primary division follows this analogy – there are soft and hard cheeses and soft (liquid) and hard (bar) soaps. So as you research soap making for, perhaps your Earth Day project, keep in mind that there are numerous approaches and styles even within both main types.
I think making your own soap is a fun and simple contribution to make to reduce the packaging you use, but as I said, the historic context also makes it a joy to do.
Montalvo Arts Center in Saratoga
Being raised on the East Coast, when I hear Saratoga I conjure white-washed horse racing stands and the memory of tasting sulfury water. It is hard to justify my years exploring the Bay Area without giving our local Saratoga a good looking over – the Saratoga that sits at the head of the Santa Cruz Mountains linking that wild paradise with Silicon Valley and the suburban buzz.
Coming to Montalvo Arts Center in Saratoga from the north you wind out of San Jose, enter a corridor of tree-lined highway and turn onto a road straddled by shaded mansions and mansionettes. Montalvo Road leads through a distinguished neighborhood, but it is a welcoming meander that adds to the grandeur of the experience.
Since hearing about this arts center, home to California’s first artist residency program, I have yet to chat with someone casually who has known about it too, or better yet, been there. But Montalvo is a place everyone should know about.